Lisbon, Oct. 29, 2024 (Lusa) - Portugal's defence minister announced on Tuesday that the number of applications to join the Armed Forces has increased, stressing that after eight years of falling recruitment and retention figures, ‘the cycle has been reversed’.
‘After eight years of recruitment and retention figures always falling, we have now seen, for the first time in many years, a reversal of this cycle,’ Nuno Melo announced at a hearing in the parliamentary committee on National Defence.
He said that in 2015, when the PS government took office, ‘there were close to 29,000 military personnel’ and in 2024, when the current government took office, ‘there were close to 23,000 military personnel’.
‘I would like to inform you that, as far as the Army is concerned, in October 2024, we registered 300 more applications than in December last year,’ he announced, adding that, in the Navy, “for the first time in a long time, there is a positive balance, in the balance between exits and entries, which will be between 125 and 150 military personnel”.
‘And the information we have from the Air Force is that there will be more candidates this year than in the last two years,’ he said.
In his opening speech to the members of the Defence Committee, Nuno Melo said that the government ‘carried out the largest combined increase in salaries and supplements’ in the Armed Forces.
‘This government has done in 115 days what the PS government didn't do in 2,920 days,’ he said before listing the measures taken since March, highlighting the updating of the military condition supplement.
Asked by PSD MP Bruno Vitorino if he thought that this increase in the number of applications was due to the measures taken by the government, Nuno Melo replied: ‘I think that actions have consequences, for better or for worse’.
‘I think there's a cause and effect relationship between the measures and the reversal of the cycle because they help to create another perception of the dignity of the Armed Forces and, particularly concerning young people, the conviction that now it's worth it,’ he said.
The defence minister said, however, that he had the "necessary prudence" to believe that we need to wait "for time to pass so that this trend proves to be consistent and, in time," we can achieve the figure of around 30,000 military personnel in the Armed Forces that the government has set as a goal by the end of the legislature.
The defence minister also announced that the government was taking steps to ensure that the processes for assessing applications for disabled status in the Armed Forces will no longer be lengthy, pointing out that they currently "take around a year".
‘I want to announce that we are currently working on the possibility of speeding up a protocol so that, through a task force, all these pending requests, which could take more than a year, can be done in 30 days,’ he said.
Questioned later by PS MP José Maria Costa about who this task force would be made up of, Nuno Melo replied that it made sense to him that it would be ‘made up of lawyers, lawyers with a scientific background, who know the legal systems’, who would analyse the pending applications in question in a short space of time.
TA/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
